Almost every post, article or thread on Reddit about PeachPie is inevitably met with someone posting the famed Ryan Reynolds GIF asking “but why?”, so instead of explaining each time, we decided to put our entire motivation behind this project on paper so that we can link to it.
PHP programs usually need a runtime installed on your target machine, appropriate version of PHP itself, a web server and some sort of configuration. This is no longer needed when you are compiling PHP code into .NET. The PHP web or console program can be distributed as a self-contained executable with no such dependencies.
We just released PeachPie 0.9.18, which targets some syntax extensions, so that PeachPie can provide more and much needed CLR interoperability features. Extending the syntax does not affect any existing PHP code and only provides developers with more options.
PHP is a language well known for its many dynamic features that are occasionally somewhat overused. Whether it is dynamic typing, type juggling or dynamic code evaluation, these features are very demanding on the underlying runtime. Another feature, the so called ‘eval’, is no less interesting. Let’s examine it further.